How ICE has changed American life

When candidate Donald Trump promised mass deportations on the 2024 campaign trail, it was hard to imagine exactly what that might turn into.

Though he boasted about implementing the “largest domestic deportation operation” in history, you could be forgiven for believing he meant something more limited — a “sequential” approach (as JD Vance suggested), starting with recent arrivals, “violent criminals,” and suspected gang members.

That, at least, seemed to be what a lot of voters who trusted him on this topic, imagined — including many immigrant-heavy communities who voted Republican in historic numbers, and were also concerned about the sometimes chaotic flow of asylum seekers into the country.

Pollsters were quick to note that though many of these deportation proposals were quite popular with the average American, support varied dramatically depending on the details. Targeted ICE arrests of convicted felons and those who arrived in the United States during the Biden presidency polled significantly better than separating mixed-status families, carrying out arrests at or near churches and schools, and deporting longtime residents — who might be your neighbors or friends.

Instead, American cities were occupied by federal law enforcement agencies; the National Guard was deployed to quell protests; unidentified and masked agents strolled through neighborhoods, chased suspects into stores, and arrested immigrants at courthouses; protesters, politicians, and journalists were arrested or injured; people with pending asylum cases were seized and deported to a notorious foreign maximum-security prison; and two American citizens were shot and killed.

Much of the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down or operated without pay as Democrats demanded new limits attached to any funding this month. In response, Trump deployed ICE to airports — to help beleaguered TSA agents and even rehabilitate their image, he says, but also implicitly to pressure an opposition party that has come to see them as the president’s personal army and associate them with repression. “That’ll drive the Democrats crazy,” US Rep. James Comer (R-KY), said on Fox Business News recently.

A year into this deportation program, it’s safe to say that the joint work of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have reshaped American life, from coast-to-coast, in both dramatic and more quiet ways. It has touched all kinds of ethnic communities — Somalis in Minnesota, Haitians in Ohio, Arabs in Michigan — and has had a particular impact on the nation’s largest cohort of recent immigrants, those from Latin America.

A new kind of civically conscious activist has risen in places that experienced ICE surges or are continuing to see enforcement actions. Local economies were devastated by deportation efforts, and are still struggling to recover. And fear, suspicion — and, in some cases, paranoia — have remade the social fabric of communities touched by ICE.

But in conversations with affected people across the country, there’s also a sense of hope — and a sense that the Trump administration is realizing how far it has gone, and may be attempting to tone down or change how it pursues its immigration goals.

ICE created a new kind of citizen-activist — the case of Charlotte

When rumors began circulating last year that ICE was planning a surge of agents to the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, locals were alarmed and looking for something to do.

“I was never really an activist, but the stuff that I was seeing, I just didn’t like,” Jonathan Pierce, a drugstore employee in Hickory, North Carolina, told me. “I didn’t like how Trump talked about immigrants and I was seeing how the immigration stuff was affecting people that I work with, who are my friends, who have been active in church.”

Fortunately, for Pierce, he had options. Concerned citizens had an easy entry point into local activism and a clear blueprint for action that had been prepared months in advance and was being tested and updated in cities around the country.

In November, Homeland Security officially announced Operation “Charlotte’s Web.” Soon, unmarked vans and masked federal agents patrolled the city and its suburbs. They would end up carrying out raids, arresting and detaining hundreds, and sparking fear in the region’s primarily Hispanic immigrant communities. But locals were already organizing and responding.

It started at the grassroots level, with support from religious leaders. Immigrant rights’ groups and legal aid organizations were already in contact with pastors, priests, and preachers in the region to iron out ways they could support immigrant neighbors. Congregants at the First United Methodist church in Taylorsville, North Carolina — Pierce among them — had already begun attending trainings on how to respond.

The original plan was to teach volunteers how they could help vulnerable neighbors get to and from churches and schools, the Rev. Joel Simpson, a First United Methodist pastor, told me. As they watched ICE tactics grow more aggressive in other cities where they had launched major operations, “those trainings shifted from what we had originally planned once we realized this could get much more violent and intense.”

Working with groups like Siembra NC and the Carolina Migrant Network, churches began to host more trainings and activate neighbors to sign up to monitor ICE operations. They learned deescalation tactics, how to communicate via whistles, and how to document interactions between ICE agents and detained people. They refreshed their frightened neighbors on what their rights were, shared how to get legal assistance, and how to be aware of potential danger.

In all, more than 2,000 people were trained and organized during that first week of ICE operations in the area, Simpson told me.

The defining image of resistance during Trump’s first term was the mass protest: The Women’s March at its start, the March for Our Lives in the middle, and finally Black Lives Matter protests at the end. In his second term, it has become more about individual action: Recording federal agents with a smartphone or sounding a car horn to alert a street to their presence.

The Minneapolis uprising that forced ICE to pull out in January — and eventually led to the firing of DHS secretary Kristi Noem — confirmed the ascendance of a new type of activist movement that had already established itself around the country: Small, nimble, local, and constantly adopting new tactics to protect neighbors from harassment, detention, or deportation.

“It’s churches and neighborhoods and grassroots community organizational networks that are already existing that mobilized to help immigrant families first and foremost,” Theda Skocpol, an expert on political organizing in the US, told me in January.

While Minneapolis was the culmination of these forms of networking, elements of this activism preceded it in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC, all following similar blueprints.

TheTrump administration sees it differently: Officials have argued that these protests and community organizing tactics are impeding normal enforcement operations — particularly deporting criminals — and that participants have endangered officers with disruptive behavior. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and use federal troops to quash protests.

Pierce’s life feels a lot different now than a year ago. He’s participated in those November trainings; he’s joined protests in both Raleigh and in Washington, DC, and he now cares about more than just immigration.

Though he’s been limited by his work schedule — child care responsibilities as a single parent — and weather, he’s tried to remain active, trying to convince neighbors in Hickory to care about ICE and other economic concerns ahead of the 2026 midterms: organizing letter-writing campaigns to local and state representatives, and talking with neighbors about the future of SNAP benefits, health insurance, and affordability.

Pierce is an example of what another preacher told me has changed in the Charlotte area: of politically agnostic or sympathetic neighbors being convinced to practice what they believe.

“I knew that there were people in Charlotte that cared for the immigrant community, but it wasn’t until Border Patrol was in Charlotte that I saw the action that came attached to that,” Erika Reynoso, a Pentecostal preacher in Gastonia, a neighboring suburb, told me. “It gave them a chance to take action as opposed to just having an ideology.”

Reynoso knew plenty of people who were detained or racially profiled during the Charlotte surge. She herself feared what might happen to her as ICE behaved more aggressively. Though she began to participate in ICE watches and mutual aid groups early in November, once she heard reports of Latino citizens being detained and questioned, she pulled back.

“I went to one of the sightings and thankfully there was already a white male verifier there, and I asked him, ‘Hey, are you here to verify?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you should leave immediately,”” she said. “I knew that in that moment there was something terrible happening in that neighborhood and he was protecting me.”

Instead, she shifted her activism toward more quiet forms of mutual aid, of educating neighbors, and preaching about social justice at her church. And though ICE’s heavy presence is gone now, those memories and that fear still linger.

But these communities have been changed for the better too, Reynoso said. The training has stuck with them, and so has the confidence that it can make a difference in practice.

“They know what it takes,” she said. “So if Border Patrol shows up again, we’re ready.”

Local economies still feel under siege — the case of Chicago

Anchored by taquerias, grocery stores, boutique shops, and bakeries on 26th Street southwest of downtown Chicago, Little Village is known as the “Mexico of the Midwest.”

It’s renowned for being the economic engine of Chicago’s Latino community — city officials told me that along with the Magnificent Mile downtown, Little Village is among the top tax-revenue-generating stretches of Chicago.

And it’s not just the locals driving commerce: Little Village, and specifically the 26th Street corridor “is a tourist destination for other Latinos in the United States,” Jennifer Aguilar, the executive director of the local chamber of commerce, told me. “We see a lot of visitors from the Midwest and East Coast that come to buy things that they can’t find in the states that they live in, like food, quinceañera dresses or ingredients that they need to cook traditional dishes. And since a lot of them can’t go to Mexico, this is the next big best thing.”

Then the immigration authorities arrived.

When Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, came to town, residents, leaders, and business owners knew to expect disruption. They just didn’t expect how bad things would get, how hard the economic hit would be, and how long it would take to recover.

Immediately, the midwestern Latino visitors who made the trek by car to drive under the corridor’s iconic welcome arch were too afraid to come in “because they heard that ICE was targeting Little Village,” Aguilar said.

News coverage at the time showed scenes of a ghost town in Little Village, of canceled Mexican Independence Day celebrations in downtown, of ICE targets being chased into shops and restaurants, of seemingly random traffic stops, and of protests prompting armored vehicles and federal agents to deploy tear gas — including at least three times in Little Village.

The effect was immediate. From September to late October, when ICE was most active in Chicago, business owners in Little Village were reporting 50 to 60 percent drops in sales compared to the previous year, according to the local alderperson, Michael D. Rodriguez. Some shops struggled to make a single sale in a week, while others temporarily closed their doors.

Wherever ICE and CBP officers have surged, a trail of economic devastation has often followed. Local businesses in multiple cities have complained of foot traffic shutting down, frightened employees staying home, and vendors scared off streets.

Nationally, these enforcement operations have remade the economy. The flow of immigrants into the United States — both documented and undocumented — has turned net negative for the first time in 50 years, according to a Brookings Institution report, with more people now exiting the country overall. The report estimated the change could result in a $60 billion to $110 billion drop in consumer spending between 2025 and 2026, and further worsen prices because of higher labor and production costs, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.

While the White House has touted every migrant worker removed as a potential job opening for a native-born one, hiring has slowed nationally over the same period. The administration has also made some concessions to immigrant-heavy industries, particularly agriculture, by discouraging raids.

But these big-picture statistics can obscure the very real way these economic hits have damaged American communities. And perhaps no place is a better example of this pattern than Little Village.

When trying to describe the economic pain caused over these weeks, the Chicagoans I spoke to tended to come back to a chilling comparison: the Covid-19 pandemic.

The last time they had felt a shock like this had been during the peak of the coronavirus shutdowns. But unlike in 2020, there were no equivalent grant programs or federally backed loans, like the Paycheck Protection Program, to help keep businesses and employees afloat.

“At least people were getting paid; you had essential workers, and I never stopped working,” Christina Gonzalez, the co-owner of the Los Comales taqueria and catering group, told me. “But we were recovering from 2020 and this [with tariffs] hit us like a one-two punch.”

When ICE and CBP arrived, businesses were already struggling with higher costs as a result of tariffs, and dealing with financial hits from some enforcement actions in the city in the first half of the year. Shop owners had to furlough or lay off employees; others couldn’t convince workers to commute to the area, for fear of being detained. This all created a cycle: Lost wages meant less purchasing power, which meant lower sales for these small businesses.

In response, city and local officials have tried their best to take stock of what was happening and track the lingering fallout. Since October, local, state, and federal representatives have met with business owners, collected testimony, connected businesses with small grant funds, and promoted campaigns to convince people of means — often wealthier, white, or citizens — to visit Little Village and other primarily Mexican American neighborhoods to shop and spend.

Still, the impacts have lingered. Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia, whose office started the “Shopping in Solidarity” initiative to promote visits and investment from those outside Little Village, said there’s only so much she and local communities can do without more state and city support. She’s called for the creation of a joint public-private relief fund to help with small business recovery and investment efforts in 2026. And she’s preparing for more bad news in April across the city.

“When the tax returns are filed, you’ll be able to actually see the real numbers,” she said. “But we know that it’s already going to be devastating just by hearing the stories and seeing it with our own eyes — the ghost towns of a lot of our neighborhoods.”

The social fabric has been changed — everywhere

All these months later, residents across the country, particularly those in immigrant or diaspora communities, continue to describe a kind of “survival mode” — a feeling that extends beyond economic pain.

It’s a sense of wariness that sometimes borders on paranoia, that ICE will return or is hanging around the corner. And it lingers even as residents prepare for better weather and more time spent together outdoors — a footprint still left on residents’ souls as they navigate public life across the country.

The stories of Latino residents in the greater Phoenix area gave me another window into this reality, in addition to stories from Charlotte and Chicago. Immigrants, mixed-status families, citizens, and activists in Maricopa County have a long history with immigration politics, deportations, and the inevitable shearing of the social fabric that comes with it.

This part of the country was the focal point of enforcement in the pre-Trump years, when the battle over immigration and what to do about those who had been living in the US for years was most acrimonious. Championed by hardline anti-illegal immigration officials like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, state law SB 1070 essentially deputized local law enforcement to enforce immigration law: requiring police to check immigration status during stops if they suspected someone might be undocumented. It made a lack of documentation a state crime, and empowered Arpaio, “America’s toughest sheriff,” to continue an aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the county that sparked accusations of racial profiling and mental and emotional distress to brown people in the region.

The law was largely blocked in court after years of long legal battles. But that memory — and the activism and organizing that sprung up in response by primarily Mexican Americans in the area — still remains.

Though Phoenix hasn’t seen the same kind of mass deployments that Chicago, Charlotte, or Minneapolis have faced, the area has experienced similar kinds of quiet enforcement, targeted raids, and rumor-mill sightings of federal agents across the area, as in those other cities.

“Our community is thinking twice when they open their doors, when they leave their homes,” César Fierros, an organizer and spokesperson for the immigrant rights group Living United for Change in Arizona, told me. “It’s this thing in the back of your head: What if you get stopped because of the color of your skin? or they inquire about your citizenship because of the color of your skin.“ It’s a fear, Fierros said, “even among citizens and people that have the proper documentation to be in the country,” of having to encounter a federal officer, of being racially profiled, of being harassed — because community members feel like it’s happened before.

Fierros told me that he’s had to have conversations with his family similar to the ones his organization is having with community members: of carrying a REAL ID, a passport, or permanent residency card at all times and making plans if a family member without documentation is detained.

“My mom’s a school bus driver. She has an accent because English is not her primary language and she’s very proud of being an American. But at the same time, she’s fearful of potentially being racially profiled by ICE or by a federal agent or by law enforcement,” Fierros told me. So his mother carries her passport with her, something that she has never done before.

It’s not just Fierros’s community that has this fear, or has changed their behavior like this. I heard similar stories from each of the people I spoke to for this story. Driven by news reports that not only undocumented immigrants have been detained or targeted for deportation, but also people in legal asylum proceedings, refugees, green card holders, students, and US citizens, their personal safety has never felt more precarious.

This uneasiness has registered in national polling as well. A Pew Research Center survey published in November analyzing the mood and feeling of Latinos living in the US found a consistent shift in how they are changing their behavior as a result of Trump’s second-term enforcement agenda. Some one in five Hispanic adults told pollsters they changed their daily activities out of fear they’ll be asked to “prove their legal status.” One in 10 say they carry a document to prove citizenship or legal status now, more often than they used to do.

And then there are more difficult conversations, about what a family will have to do in the case that someone is detained.

Yolanda Landeros, a 56-year-old resident of Buckeye, a Phoenix suburb, told me that in addition to carrying a REAL ID and avoiding spending too much time outdoors, she’s had to develop different plans with her extended family in the Southwest and Iowa about what to do if ICE comes knocking or detains a member — memorizing phone numbers to alert family or attorneys, knowing not to open doors, and asking for warrants.

She’s most worried about an undocumented cousin living in Iowa, who deals with chronic health issues and requires dialysis treatment.

“If he gets detained, he could be there for days, weeks, or months. He can’t do that. He won’t survive,” Landeros told me.

So they developed a Plan A, B, and C:

The stories of changed social and family life around the country reminded me of what my colleague Anna North recently dubbed the “ICE pandemic” — the sense that even beyond the lasting fear and economic damage that ICE surges created, there is also lingering damage to community trust and willingness to participate in social life. Kids have been kept home from school or educated remotely; churchgoers skipped services or were issued dispensations to forgive a missed Mass; scared workers stayed home and refused to expose themselves to potential stops; sick kids or adults in need of medical care opted to delay or postpone checkups for fear of ICE exposure.

And there’s the sadness that comes with knowing people who have opted to uproot their lives preemptively, retire early, or self-deport.

“They want to wear people down, and it has worked in some instances,” Aguilar, the Chicago small business activist, told me. “Some business owners have shared with me stories of regular clients that they’ve had for years that decided to self-deport because they’re like, Well, I’d rather take my stuff with me. I’d rather go home in a dignified way than end up in one of these camps and God knows where I’ll end up and if my family’s going to be able to reach me.”

Gonzales, of Los Comales in Chicago, recalled how her son asked her if he should be carrying his passport or ID around with him in order to prove his citizenship.

“I said, ‘No, fuck ‘em.’ Somebody needs to vet me? I’m not living in a Kafka-esque Nazi government,” she said. “You can find me with my fingerprints or you can figure out who I am based on the information I give you from my mouth. But I should not have to show you my goddamn ID to walk down the street.”

Ratings of Trump’s immigration policy have been solidly negative for months now among voters, shifting most dramatically among Latinos, Latino Republicans, and Trump 2024 voters. A Fox News poll in March found his overall approval at 28 percent with Hispanic respondents, with 72 percent disapproving. Democrats have also made gains in elections with Hispanic communities that swung right in 2024. Trump has reportedly told his inner circle that he fears his early plans for “mass deportation” have gone too far for voters.

For now, residents in these communities remain in a bit of a holding pattern. They all expect that ICE or CBP will return at some point, particularly after the outrage and attention that the Minneapolis operations sparked dies down. But they also feel some optimism about how their communities and neighbors will respond in the future. In each of my conversations, a silver lining was repeated: that even though there is more suspicion and fear now, there are new bonds that have been forged among neighbors, in faith communities, and among Latinos themselves, specifically.

“Whatever divisions there may have been across the Latino community with the us versus them, the documented versus the undocumented, the criminals versus the noncriminals…there’s a greater sense of unity now and a willingness to help,” Reynoso, the Pentecostal pastor in North Carolina, told me. “We must exercise grace and compassion with each other in these uncertain times.”